There’s a commonly used phrase about living one’s life on ‘borrowed time’. And it applied to Gary Rossington more than most. In surviving Lynyrd Skynyrd’s plane crash on October 20, 1977, the guitarist was given an extra 46 years to live. Six members of the iconic southern rock group and support team – frontman Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines, backing singer Cassie Gaines, assistant road manager Dean Kilpatrick and pilot and co-pilot Walter McCreary and William John Gray – were not so fortunate.
A God-fearing man like Rossington might even say that the Lord had handed second lives to him, fellow guitarist Allen Collins, bassist Leon Wilkeson, keyboard player Billy Powell, drummer Artimus Pyle and backing singer Leslie Hawkins.
In the short term and over the decades that followed, the crash affected each of the survivors in different ways. For Billy Powell, a long-term victim of bullying from the hot-headed Van Zant, whose strong-arm tactics had quite literally knocked the fledgling band from students at the Robert E Lee High School into arena-headlining shape, his immediate knee-jerk reaction was one of relief.
“As time went by I’d kinda forgiven Ronnie for [knocking out] my teeth, but right before the plane crash I was getting fed up with it all,” Powell told me in a 2003 interview. “When that plane came down, I wasn’t knocked unconscious like all the rest. One of my first thoughts was: ‘Thank God it’s over – Idon’t have to get beaten up any more.’ It didn’t last long. Of course, I wanted the beating to stop, but not like it did.”
